On Reflection
by Thursday's Dove
Summary: Sometimes, when you get older, you realize that you don't know someone as well as you thought you did. People change, sometimes in unfavorable ways. But love still binds you together. Bra reflects on this about her cousin, Gohai. OC/AU


**[A/N:** This is just a short little scene I had in my head that I had to write out. Gohai is an OC/AU character who is the son of Gohan and Aqua (another OC/AU character, who is Vegeta's sister, thus making Gohai and Bra cousins). I wanted to write this to illustrate both Gohai and Bra's closeness to one another, and how when you grow up, sometimes you learn that you don't know someone as well as you thought you did. Let's see, what else... Oh, Gohai and Bra share an apartment together here. And I think the rest of it pretty much speaks for itself. Enjoy. :)** ]**

---

He started awake when a rolled-up sock hit him rather hard in the face. His eyelids fluttered open only to find that someone had opened the blinds, allowing bright yellow sunlight to stream in directly into his face. Suddenly, he felt his hangover throb to life.

"What the hell?" he groaned, his deep blue eyes searching for the culprit. He groaned again when he saw a blue-haired girl standing there at the foot of his bed, a sneer on her expression and her hands on her hips.

"Wake up, you lazy jerk!" she yelled.

The blankets beside him shifted and he heard a gasp.

"Gohai, what's going on?" the second girl asked, slightly alarmed by their unexpected visitor and clutching the blanket to her bare torso.

Gohai regarded her with a baffled gaze—as if he didn't remember why there was a naked girl in his bed—that melted into one of humor. He sighed and rolled his eyes and laid his head back down on the pillow.

"Don't worry, she's harmless," he said to the naked blonde beside him in the bed, waving his hand at the blue-haired girl to indicate that she was the harmless one; the blonde looked doubtful and highly flustered. Gohai then pulled the covers back over his head which, by now, was pounding furiously.

"Go away, Bra, I'm trying to sleep," he called over to the girl who had thrown the sock.

"No!" she yelled back, throwing another rolled-up sock at him. "We had a deal, so wake up!"

Her voice sounded like an impossibly loud siren to his ears. He winced at the sound of it.

"Ugh, what are you even talking about?" he mumbled from underneath the blanket.

The blonde, still flustered, just stared back and forth between Gohai and Bra.

"You said you'd buy me breakfast this morning!" she fumed, readying yet another sock.

"Did I really?" he asked in a noncommittal tone.

"Yes! Oh," she scoffed and paused, smirking. "Not that you'd _remember_, given the state you're in."

"Exactly," he replied without missing a beat. "So let me sleep."

Another sock bounced off where his face was under the blanket. The midnight blue-haired hybrid emitted a slight growl of frustration, threw the blanket off his head again, and glared at the offending girl.

"Cut it out, damn it!" he hissed, however despite his hammering headache and the fact that there was a naked girl in his bed and that his cousin was throwing socks at him, the corners of his mouth twitched slightly into an amused grin.

"You have ten minutes, Son Gohai, and then I'm going to take your blanket and stuff it down your throat!" Bra said with a note of superiority and finality in her voice.

"Fiiiiiiine," Gohai groaned for a third time, now sitting up in bed and rubbing his temples and trying to talk his headache into vanishing.

With a victorious grin, Bra turned around and marched out of his room, slamming the door behind her. Gohai flinched again at the way the door slamming had sounded like a gunshot to his sensitive ears. The blonde just stared.

"Well, you heard her," Gohai sighed, running a hand through his unruly hair and ruffling it up.

"And what am _I_ supposed to do?" the blonde scoffed, offended.

Gohai gave her the look of someone who had just asked him how one takes a shit, while in the meantime trying to remember her name. He found that he couldn't, but also found that it didn't matter, and furthermore found that he didn't care—he never did, after all.

"Well, you know," he started, giving her a disarming grin which made her relax almost immediately, "She _did_ give me ten minutes." He wiggled his eyebrows at her and she giggled.

At that, Gohai stroked a hand gently down the length of her smooth thigh under the blanket, and the blonde forgot about how annoyed she was by Gohai's cousin barging in on them.

---

Fifteen minutes later, the blonde having departed five minutes prior, Gohai was stumbling out of his room and grinning foolishly at his cousin Bra, who was standing there with her arms folded and her foot tapping impatiently on the ground.

"Whaaat?" he chimed, attempting to disarm her with a bright, silly grin. When she continued to glare disapprovingly at him, he added, "I got showered and dressed as quickly as I could! Ten minutes wasn't nearly long enough to do that! I have an image to maintain, you know."

"Well," she said smoothly, "If you hadn't been so busy screwing around with that blonde bimbo while you were at it, you would have had _plenty_ of time to, as you put it, 'maintain your image'."

Gohai hung his head in defeat and put a hand over his heart. "You hurt me here, Bra," he sighed.

"Yeah, right," she scoffed and rolled her eyes.

"No, really." He came up to her and took her hand, placing it over his heart, too. "It aches with the guilt of how I made you wait for your breakfast."

Bra snatched her hand away and gazed coolly up at him. "I'm sure your heart is in _pieces_, Gohai."

"It really is. Tiny bits, you might even say," he chirped and grinned again, slipping an arm around her shoulder and pecking her affectionately on the cheek.

Bra couldn't help it; her belligerence towards him immediately melted away. She just couldn't stay mad at him for long. No girl could, in fact. It was one of the most annoying traits he possessed that he knew how to skillfully manipulate. It was that and his sense of humor that wooed so many otherwise stubborn girls into his bed throughout the week.

She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder and said sweetly, "I've got my heart set on waffles and eggs."

Gohai leaned his head against hers briefly before righting himself again and smirking.

"Is that all, your highness?" he teased, receiving a poke in the ribs for his sarcasm.

"Yes, that is all, servant boy," Bra returned.

"I want coffee," Gohai said with a mock frown. His head _did_ still hurt, although the hasty shower had helped with the worst of it.

"Have whatever you want; you're paying," the girl said, patting his chest consolingly.

"You're a foul creature at times, you know that?"

"I do indeed."

With that, Gohai laughed and together he and Bra set out to retrieve their breakfast.

---

"Thank the gods for coffee," Gohai said with a hint of desperation in his voice. He sipped liberally at it after having practically inhaled the first cup. He made a sound of utter satisfaction as he did so.

Bra watched him covertly from over the top of her own cup of coffee.

"No wonder you're so hyper all the time," she mused, setting down her cup and getting to work on cutting up her waffles into perfect squares.

"Huh? This?" he inquired, and held up his cup. "Nah, this is just a blood transfusion. I can't survive without this shit."

"Gohai," she interrupted him, her smile fading a little.

"Hm?" He looked up from his cup and tilted his head to the side in a look of questioning.

"If you walked in on me and some random guy in bed," she said, her eyes staying on her waffles, "what would you do?"

"What?" he stuttered incredulously. "I'd kick his ass, that's what I'd do." He paused, his dark blue eyes widening. "Are you trying to tell me something? Do I need to kick someone's ass?"

"No," she replied quietly, and finally her eyes met his. He blinked back at her.

"Then what?"

"It's just that…" She sighed as she tried to figure the words in her head so that he would understand. "You're so adamant about making sure boys aren't staring at me or trying to feel me up," she said carefully, shifting in her seat self-consciously; she knew that boys often eyed her longingly—she had caught and glared at many a boy for doing so, even without her favorite cousin there to do it for her, but still… "And yet you, at the same time, sleep with all these girls…"

"Yeah?"

Bra sighed. Of course he didn't understand. Gohai was by no means an idiot, but he certainly wasn't a genius when it came to the emotions and feelings of others. He and Bra had always been very close and so they knew each other to a tee, but still Gohai was just about the densest male around in light of the feelings of girls, except for hers. She reflected that she had known that he would be confused, knowing him so well and all.

"Well, what's the difference between the two?"

"Easy," Gohai said taking another long sip of his coffee. "You're my favorite person. No one's allowed to touch you, not unless they want my foot in their ass, and I do believe that most people have an aversion to having a foot in their ass."

Bra smiled faintly, also reflecting that she knew he would, of course, make light of the conversation.

"But what about those girls you sleep with, Gohai? I'm sure that many of them have cousins who would kick your ass, too, if they knew what you were doing."

"Well," Gohai scoffed good-naturedly, leaning back in his chair, "I'd like to see 'em try. They'd end up on the fucking moon for their troubles."

"That's not the point," she said quietly, sighing and taking a bite of one of her waffles.

Gohai watched his cousin carefully. He understood what she was getting at, really he did, but he also knew that he enjoyed what he did and he wasn't about to stop doing it. He was a male and the leader singer of a band and also happened to be considered attractive among the majority of the female half of the population, so it wasn't like he had to _try_ to get girls to sleep with him… they just _did_.

"I just wish that you'd show a little bit more respect for girls, like how you respect me, that's all," the girl spoke quietly again.

Gohai took his turn to sigh, his eyes still watching his favorite person in the world.

"You know," he said, "It isn't like I force them into doing anything, Bra. See, that's the difference." Gohai perked up, knowing he was onto explaining his side of things. "You don't do things with random guys because you know better, even though you're, let's face it, hot." He felt encouraged by her smile, however reluctant it was. "That's the difference between you and these girls. You're too smart. They aren't. They don't _have_ to come back to my room with me when I ask them to. I don't force any of them into anything. And sometimes I don't even _have_ to ask, they do all on their own."

"But still," she cut in, although she knew he had a point, "You don't _have_ to take them up on their offers either."

"No, but I want to," he said, and flashed her a sunny grin.

After that, she knew it was pointless to argue further. He _was_ a guy after all, and hadn't her mother told her that all guys were the same? Well, most. More specifically, the lesson was that _most_ guys were the same; it was just that the good ones were few and far between and extremely difficult to find. She just never thought that Gohai could ever be one of those guys who were "the same."

This thought saddened Bra in her heart of hearts because she knew that she loved her cousin more than anyone—hell, she had shared things with him that she hadn't even shared with her own parents—and yet she also knew that she couldn't possibly love a guy who behaved like her beloved cousin did. It was one hell of a catch 22, and she hated it.

It also made her sad to remember how many times he had gotten in trouble at school for beating up boys on the playground during recess, boys who had been staring at her or harassing her in any way. He would never let anything happen to her, she knew he would have died for her without a second thought, and yet… he had grown into such a hypocrite, and she almost couldn't stand it. She honestly didn't know what she'd do the next time she saw him stumbling into his room with a new girl.

She sighed heavily. Gohai saw and heard this and made an effort to cheer her up by flicking a straw wrapper at her. It bounced off her arm and she did manage a small smile.

He was still a good person. She knew that he was. She also knew that she was probably overreacting and at some point during the day, he'd find a way of making her laugh her troubled thoughts away. That was just the kind of guy he was. Hadn't she known that all along?

"Hey," he piped up, sensing that she was thinking too much about their conversation. "After this, you wanna go to the park and play Frisbee? I think this coffee is curing my hangover." And after a pause, "Say yes. You know you wanna."

Bra smiled. Yes, that was just the kind of guy he was, and she had known it all along, and she still loved him most of all, and she knew, selfishly, that despite all those girls he slept with, he loved her most of all, too. Those girls meant nothing to him, but she meant the world.

"Sure."

**[**PS: I don't own DBZ; I do, however, own Gohai. ;)**]**


End file.
